


to give myself to you

by Blake



Series: 30 Days of Depeche Mode Bagginshield ficlets [9]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Baking, Cultural Differences, Fluff, M/M, The Shire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:00:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23801218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: Thorin gives Bilbo his best approximation of a wedding night.
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield
Series: 30 Days of Depeche Mode Bagginshield ficlets [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1705147
Comments: 12
Kudos: 106





	to give myself to you

**Author's Note:**

> I might take a break from these this weekend! But they've been so fun to write. Thanks for reading! Fun fact, I basically wrote this same scene in another fandom today lol. I guess I have gay marriage workarounds on the brain.

“It is a shame, though.” Bilbo looks out the window with his hands wrist-deep in his latest bread dough. Thorin loves to watch him like this, effortlessly molding flour and water as though it were as predictable as hot iron.

“What is a shame?” Thorin asks, even though he’s almost certain Bilbo is once again lamenting that Thorin’s strong hands offer so little help in the kitchen. He has tried to help knead as instructed, but the dough always seems to suffocate under his touch.

“That we won’t get a wedding night.” Bilbo angles his head just so to send a cheeky look, which implies that there’s something worth being cheeky about.

Thorin crosses his arms, thumbing across his own lip in thought. After months of dancing around the subject and trying to think of alternatives, they’ve only just agreed to give up on the idea of a formal marriage. If Thorin was just any dwarf, and not one of the line of Durin, then they could have wed in the dwarven custom. But political realities made a royal marriage to an outsider improbable, and his own renown—or infamy—rendered impossible a quiet ceremony amongst people who would not gossip. And according to Bilbo, a marriage in the hobbit tradition is absolutely out of the question, and they daren’t even ask around to see if someone might officiate such a thing, because they would instantaneously become the most famous individuals in all of the shire, and they would never have a quiet day without some pesky relatives sticking their curious and judgmental noses through the door of Bag End.

To Thorin, it already feels as though those pesky relatives do their fair share of curious and judgmental visits as it is, so he doesn’t question Bilbo’s reluctance to invite more.

“Wedding night?” he asks after some time. As much as they’ve talked about weddings in various traditions, they have not discussed the time of day that such ceremonies must take place. “Do hobbits only wed after the sun has set?”

Bilbo stares at him with his mouth slightly agape. He does that when he’s trying to tell if Thorin is joking or not, which means either that Thorin has succeeded in tricking him or, as in this case, that he has said something ignorant. Embarrassed, Thorin feels himself blushing, which is probably what usually gives away the fact that he’s not pretending not to know something. “The night after the wedding,” Bilbo clarifies, though it’s not much clarification at all.

“I see.” Thorin thinks back on the few weddings he has attended. The bride and groom eat, drink, and dance alongside the whole party late into the night, or even until dawn, celebrating the formalization of their union and the fact that their friends may all now visit their shared home, as it is now legally shared. Somehow, he does not think that is the kind of celebration Bilbo is referring to. “What is the hobbit custom for a wedding night?”

Bilbo’s hands pause in the middle of his attempt to roll the dough into a round shape. “Well, you know,” he insists. The curls on his head bounce sweetly in the sunshine coming through the kitchen window as he completes his task and sets the dough on the counter. “The married couple celebrates their joining. Consummates their marriage.”

Now that Bilbo’s brushing his apron clean, and Thorin’s not in danger of indirectly injuring the bread, he lets his hand drop down into those silken curls and rubs his hand happily through them. “By—joining?” Thorin asks, holding Bilbo’s head down to guard the confusion that’s surely on his own face. “As we do every night?”

“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds silly.” Bilbo moves out from under his hand, turning to wash the flour from his hands with a rag. “But it’s meant to be—it’s romantic. It’s, well, it’s meant to be special. Giving yourself to—The first time—Oh, never mind. It is silly. I don’t suppose dwarves wait for marriage, do they? Not that hobbits do, either. They just make a charade of it. Well, we’ve got to let that sit now for a few hours. Will you help me, ah, gather some wood for the stove?”

Thorin looks at the full stack of wood lying beside the stove, smiles to himself, and follows his would-be husband out of the kitchen and away from the conversation Bilbo so clearly wishes to avoid.

That night, Thorin spends an even longer time bathing than usual, as one might do if marriage were a commencement, rather than a culmination, of a life together. He reaches out the window to grab whatever flowers grow beneath it, for what he has heard of hobbit weddings involves a lot of flowers. After oiling his hair, he ties it back, to give Bilbo the opportunity to let it down, because that is one of the only things Thorin can think of that Bilbo has never done to him before.

When Bilbo finds him in their bed, he presses his knuckles to his mouth, as though holding back from something that Thorin hopes is not laughter. “Husband,” Thorin says, lifting himself slightly higher on the pillows, an ever so slightly less vulnerable position. “Would you join with me on this marriage night?”

Bilbo does laugh as he walks quickly across the room and sits on the edge of the bed, but he still sounds as though he is holding back from something, and now Thorin can hear that it is most likely the desire to jump on top of him and bite marks into his beard without so much as an after-supper greeting.

“Wedding night,” Bilbo says distractedly, eyes flicking back and forth from Thorin’s face to the petals on the bed, and then from Thorin’s hair to the simple robe that’s mostly covering his body.

Thorin props up on his elbows now, because he hadn’t anticipated that lying down meant not being close enough to put his fingers in Bilbo’s hair and kiss him. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” He presses the words against Bilbo’s tender lips like a secret, even though he has spoken them many times before. His heart flutters, as though this is romantic, as though it is special.

Bilbo kisses him deeply, clever tongue playing tricks on his mind and turning his limbs to heavy stone. His hands find their way into Thorin’s hair, kneading it loose from its tie, taking the unspoken invitation and delving into untouched secrets. He is everything Thorin loves about him all at once.

There are two slim fingers pumping in and out of him before Bilbo answers in words. “I am yours, forever.”

When all is said and done, and Bilbo makes a delirious, adorable show of wrapping his face in Thorin’s hair to fall asleep in, and Thorin’s muscles ache in the sweet way that erases all the years of pain from his body, Thorin decides that wedding nights are actually quite a lovely idea, especially if they happen every night of a marriage.


End file.
